Exactly a year ago, at re:Invent 2024, Amazon announced their foundation models – Amazon Nova. At Day 2 of re:Invent 2025, Amazon announced an expansion of its Nova family with four new models – with substantial increase in performance while maintaining similar pricing. In short, Nova 2 takes it all up a notch.
Primarily focused on industry-leading price-to-performance ratio, the in-house models were designed to be highly cost effective – some models offering up to even a 75% reduction for specific use cases. The other USP was the seamless deep integration with the AWS ecosystem – streamlining deployment and workflows through AWS Bedrock efficiently.
GoML has helped a number of customers use Nova to ensure their AI solutions deliver RoI in production. In fact, GoML was one of the earliest companies to be given beta access to Nova 2 and we are actively piloting them for customers in December 2025.
Why was Nova 2 needed?
AWS introduced its Nova model family in 2024, but they have yet to become a top choice among developers. According to a July survey by Menlo Ventures, by midyear Anthropic—backed by Amazon—held 32% of the enterprise LLM market, followed by OpenAI at 25%, Google at 20%, and Meta at 9%. Nova models accounted for less than 5%, the firm noted. In response, AWS is positioning the newly upgraded Nova 2 series to shift that narrative.
However, Amazon Bedrock has also added 18 open weight models to Bedrock including models from Google, Nvidia, Mistral, Alibaba's Qwen and OpenAI.
“We think model choice is so critical. We've never believed that there was going to be one model to rule them all, but rather that there will be a ton of great models out there, and it's why we've continued to rapidly build upon an already wide selection of models,” said CEO Matt Garman.
Nova 2 Lite
Nova 2 Lite is a fast, cost-effective reasoning model for everyday workloads building upon Nova Lite.
How is it different from Nova Lite?
Limited complex reasoning was one of the cons of Nova Lite which Nova 2 Lite addresses by supporting extended thinking – more time for models to reason out before generating outputs.
It makes the model more accurate when tackling multi-step problems, from agent workflows and advanced math to complex planning and writing code. This might also give developers more precise control over the outputs – another drawback of Nova Lite.
First Impressions of Nova 2 Lite
Customers can dial up or down how much step-by-step thinking the model does, letting them choose between deeper intelligence or faster, cheaper responses—perfect for chatbots, document workflows, and automation tasks.
Benchmarking
According to Amazon, Nova 2 Lite equal or better on 13 out of 15 benchmarks compared to Claude Haiku 4.5, equal or better on 11 out of 17 benchmarks compared to GPT-5 Mini, and equal or better on 14 out of 18 benchmarks compared to Gemini Flash 2.5.
Nova 2 Pro
Nova 2 Pro is Amazon's most intelligent reasoning model that can process text, images, video, and speech – designed and positioned for highly complex workloads.
How is it different from Nova Pro?
The major difference is ability to be used as a teacher model, helping create smaller, specialized versions through knowledge distillation. Apart from that, one can presume that Nova 2 has better performance and speed. With a context window of 1M-tokens, Nova 2 Pro is more similar to Nova Premier than Nova Pro except for the pricing.
First Impressions of Nova 2 Pro
Nova 2 Pro appears to combine the general-purpose reasoning of Nova Pro with the distillation capabilities of Nova Premier into a single model with AWS probably simplifying the Nova family to make space for Omni.
Benchmarking
According to Amazon, Nova 2 Pro is equal or better on 10 out of 16 benchmarks compared to Claude Sonnet 4.5, equal or better on 8 out of 16 benchmarks compared to GPT-5.1, equal or better on 15 out of 19 benchmarks compared to Gemini 2.5 Pro, and equal or better on 8 out of 18 benchmarks compared to Gemini 3 Pro Preview.
This is a live page. We will continue adding more information about implementation, use cases, benchmarks, and technical notes as we explore Nova 2 in real world projects.
Meanwhile, we do have more information about Nova 2 Omni and the larger AWS AI ecosystem.
